Art Blog

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NEW YORK'S Metropolitan Museum of Art has confirmed that the theme for its annual Costume Institute exhibition and Met Gala on May 1, will be Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons.
As...

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), nineteenth-century Britain's greatest land- and seascape artist, depicted ports throughout his career, both in monumental oil paintings and in watercolors. An insatiable traveler and an artist with a deep...

No less a figure than Rembrandt collected works by the Dutch painter-printmaker Hercules Segers (c. 1589-c. 1638). In recent years the haunting, prescient, often preternatural quality of his innovative printmaking has earned him cult status among...

In honor of the 80th anniversary of Pablo Picasso‘s famous Guernica, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid has announced that it will be hosting a major exhibition this year highlighting the artist's depictions of warfare and his ambivalent...

For the past several months, Artspace's editors have persistently investigated the novel challenges and opportunities that the 21st century holds for the venerable brick-and-mortar gallery system, which has been shaken by both the shifting market...

Picasso first 'violated' traditional space in Les Demoiselle d'Avignon, depicting 5 prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyo (Street) in Barcelona, in an angular and disjointed manner. None are conventionally feminine, and the two figures on the right present with African mask-like features. Paris flea markets at the turn of the center were a source of these masks, but it is the disjointed angularity of the figures, that reflect a modernity inspired by early cinema that led to the dimensional shift in Picasso's and Braque's art known as Cubism.
We are seeing the abandonment of perspective drawing in the five figures, the single painterly devise binding classical art since it evolved in the Italian Renaissance.
Earliest painting and drawing typically sized the objects/figures depicted in according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer. The use of perspective gave a sense of realism to the work of art. Perspective appears in Indian and Chinese art before being used in European art. Perspective is generally considered to have come to Europe in the early 15th century in the works of Filippo Brunelleschi. Soon after nearly every artist in Florence and in Italy adopted geometric perspective in their paintings.
Many systems broke down in the face of WWI, 'The Great War', however I propose that Picasso was responding to the newest invention in photography, CINEMA.
John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, recounts that Picasso saw his first film in Barcelona, probably in 1896, when he was 15. Friends like Salmon and the early film writer and critic Maurice Raynal wrote of their frequent trips with 'la bande a Picasso,' which included the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to the movie screens scattered through Montmartre and other neighborhoods beginning in the first decade of the 20th century in Paris. The earliest films were nothing liked 'polished' cinema of today. They were wildly diverse, short, disjointed, sprocketed visions of pratfalls, bawdy dancers, airplane stunts and hallucinatory special-effects experiments. Picasso, and Braque (and James Joyce) were crazy about the movies.
- Photography and the Roots of Modernism by Janet Lehr

Covering Art Basel Miami Beach since its inception 14 years ago I frankly didn't think there would be any stories left to tell, yet there's inevitable change and flux afoot though not entirely for the better. Miami is one of the few, if not...

LONDON - The graffiti artist Banksy unveiled his latest artworks on Friday - immigration-themed murals that he painted onto public spaces in and around the "jungle," a refugee camp near Calais, France.
Read full article Here .

One of only a handful of blue period Picassos still in private hands will come to the market with a never publicly seen secret on the reverse of its canvas.
Picasso's La Gommeuse, an erotically charged 1901 painting of a cabaret performer, is remarkable in its own right and will create waves at the top end of the global art auction market.